My father lying in the dry yellow grass as if he were sunbathing, except his face was squinting in displeasure, eyes closed but no rest. Ants crawling over him, black figures on his arms and neck and boots.
The pattern of wind in the grass, sweeping up the hill in rounded blows that veered and spread and vanished again. Silver gone yellow, returned to waiting, and then silver again, pressed low against the earth. No predicting where or when but only watching and waiting, seeing and forgetting. An element we could never hold, never capture, even as we breathed it. And the land in folds and rises already, preshaped. All made silent by the trees behind us, a dislocation of sound. What we saw seemed only a dream, another place of worship, but this time the congregation was left alone, the priest become a child tottering off into his cones.
13
DESERT THE HOME OF THE BIBLE. WE COME FROM DESERT. We’re meant to walk across dry ground, meant to breathe dry wind. This open glade of dry grass grown only to our shins, thin stalks with too much space between, not a place where more can grow. Hordes of us burning under the sun, water a clock and nothing more, step after step in our vast migrations, and how did we become so numerous?
Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel, then Abel is gone, but there are enough people for Cain to build a city. We are sudden apparitions, risen out of the dust in great armies as Cain walked toward where he would found that city. Cain and the others we remember from the Old Testament are demigods. Noah lived nine hundred and thirty years. But we are more ephemeral, risen and walking, made of dust but filled with thirst. Dust that will not rest. And this is god’s will, but his cruelty was to make the dust think, so that it would know its thirst as it walked.
Tom already far down that slope, a walker the same as thousands of generations before him, dissolving into the folds of earth, visible and then gone and then visible again, patterns sweeping over him, patterns he would not see or know but would participate in nonetheless.
And I followed, as of course I would. Walking is all we know. Only the broken lie down and refuse to walk. My father with all taken away: his rifle, his will, his future. There was nothing I could do but leave him. The feel of that ground beneath my boots, ripped and changed forever, sound of it against the wind, a scab-land of spiked burrs and yellow thorns, dislocated and without source, brought here and forgotten.
Some feeling of hope at the beginning of every walk, something in the act of setting out, a pleasure. The scattering of small lizards before me, bodies without momentum, a run and instant stop then run again. Gravity with no hold at that scale.
I looked for the tallest of the grasses and pulled one from the ground, bent the end back carefully and creased it over itself and tied to form a slipknot. Squatting with my rifle close, the stock of it on the ground and barrel on my shoulder. I kept an eye on Tom where he was disappearing below and also on the edge of the glade above, where my father and grandfather were lost to their own callings.
A small loop now at the end of the grass, slipknot noose for lizards, and I stood and walked carefully, each footfall held back and erased, and I followed these tiny remnants of time, plated backs and scaled necks, holes only for ears and expressionless mouth, eyes direct apprehenders of the world, no mediation, no thought. The first hunters and no desire to hunt but only shadows of movement and instinct to devour. If I held still, I became the same as any rock, unrecognized. All forgotten instantly, each moment new, the world as it is. On moving, I became something again. And so I became rock then movement then rock then movement then rock again across that desert until the yellow stalk I held outstretched with its loop hovered just above a fat lizard with blue along the sides of its neck.
I was very still, and the grass in my hand trembled only slightly, moving less than the stalks around us that leaned over and shook and went upright again. Sound of that to a lizard. Head jointed, twitched to one side, cocked upward. Body a sack of thick skin, slumped.
I lowered the noose very slowly, and the lizard cocked its head the other way, gauging what? I lowered until the edge of the loop came down past his chin, and then I yanked back and up and the lizard dangled midair in a panic that reached back to everything that had ever crawled. Legs and tail thrashing at air, body kinking, all soundless. The wind in the grasses and trees all that I could hear. I held him up close, looked into his eyes, and still no recognition. Tail a snake in a wave pattern, as responsive as water in wind, just as conscious. Yellow collar, blue throat, warm air, all equivalent.
I lowered him to the ground and he charged at the collar. I let go. A lizard now with a stalk trailing, and perhaps it would trail always.
Every field populated. Humans not sovereign. The lizard a predator, a giant, but not enough of him to cover this ground. All has been taken over by insects. Hundreds or thousands within reach no matter where we stand. I went down on my hands and knees, the rifle in dirt and bare grass, and watched the infestation. Ants black or black and red, polished and untouched and their legs not quite reaching ground, suspended just enough to leave no track. Stink bugs a dull gray and folded, bright orange along their edges. Grasshoppers nearly invisible against the light brown clumps of dirt, waiting until the very last moment to jump. The activity of the world mostly invisible to us.
I rose and walked again, the hot air and late sun a pleasure, even the lizards and insects a pleasure, something about being that age, something I have trouble recovering now. I look at a field now and see nothing but time.
But when I was eleven, time was unlimited and unknown, life a thing that stretched infinitely, and I walked through grass without being able to feel my ankles or knees or back, nothing yet failed, joints a rumor only, muscle and bone not yet separating. I felt no guilt at all, no remorse, and no worry as I know it now, only impatience, only movement, and this slope caved and rose and the wind swept past and I could see across to other mountains and feel the mountain rise behind me.
I was looking for bucks again, along every edge. Approaching the line of brush and trees that divided the two glades, I slowed and crouched and kept my rifle low. The shadows stretching toward me, a thin ruff of cover. I ducked beneath branches of small gray pines and found Tom sitting against a trunk, hidden in shadow.
No sign of a buck, he whispered.
I sat against a trunk ten feet away. Our rifles across our thighs. A few more trees in front of us and then the bright yellow of the enormous glade below, large enough to be its own region. A ridge in the center with rock outcrops. A fold to the left that fell down into a large stand of sugar pines. Wide arcs of open field to either side, and a line of brush high on the right, a fire road hidden behind it.
Breezy here, cooler in the shade, cicadas pulsing. Large dragonflies cruising the margins. A few small white butterflies in their jagged flights just above the tips of the dry grasses.
I was there the day you were born, Tom said. There was no sign.
Sign of what?
Nothing to warn us. If anything, you seemed like nothing. I had a beer, I got bored, and I left.
What was my mother like?
Ask your dad.
He never says.
Well.
The lower glade a great burning disk, and we rode an edge of it, tilting higher. The heat of it.
It’s not just that you’ve done one thing, Tom said.
What’s that?
The problem is that you’re never going to follow any rule, ever.